Faced with growing database storage needs, information technology (IT) departments are increasingly implementing networked storage, such as network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs), as well as direct-attach storage. Managing these heterogeneous and often distributed storage environments is typically a time-consuming manual task, requiring individual management of each storage device. In addition, the IT departments frequently experience “stranded” capacity, e.g., one device cannot be accessed by applications that need the device, or capacity is tied up in stale or wasted storage, resulting in inefficient resource utilization. Therefore, early detection of future performance problems is important to system administrators.
Existing network management systems generally cannot predict future performance behavior based on past performance behavior. In some systems, performance problems are reported when threshold violations occur, but system administrators must configure thresholds based on a hard limit. Configuration of thresholds based on hard limits may be difficult because the system administrators must have an understanding of the current SAN performance to perform this task.